Kid Want Soda Go Nyoom – Boo! Greedy Kid Review

The titling of this game might be the single best game name ever, beyond misreading off-brand Guess Who as WHO EET EES.

It encapsulates everything about the game: your primary ability, the main character, the story-world’s understanding and attitude towards that character. And you can say it in a southern accent while ignoring the punctuation and end up with the same physical sensation as playing the game.

Just to confirm, Boo! Greedy Kid takes as long to play, and is as emotionally fulfilling and mechanically complex, as humorously attempting to say its title is.

For anything else, that might seem utterly damning a statement to make. Thing is aboutBoo! Greedy Kidis that it seems tailor made to be consumed in a tiny fashion, and as light-heartedly as possible. Its visual design and sparse narrative context, as well as its polished, minimalistic gameplay, harken back to those adolescent days playing Icy Tower or Club Penguin’s minigames or Pokémon; but you’ve taught your Charizard four fire-type moves and brute-force your way through every trainer who dares stand in your apocalyptic wake.

After a wee narrative justification for why your character is such a dick, you’re off on a gauntlet of 99 individual levels. Each level incrementally introduces different room compositions and hazards, which take the form of police-men-officers, old people, dudes in SWAT gear, and RoboCop. Everyone you’d expect to see in Boo! Greedy Kid’s vaguely Hotline Miami-esque cross-section of an apartment block.

The game puts up visually stylised tutorials on the few keybinds it has, as well as the behaviour of its AI, but it also encourages you to blitz through its levels by way of a star rating system (which, in this case, I could genuinely not care less about.) I ended up accidentally busting more ass than I needed to in a couple levels because I neglected to realise that you could roll past enemies and projectiles rather than just slam yourself into the grave. After that point, things clicked into place pretty heckin’ well. Stringing together abilities is mad neat.

So why’s the score down there, though? In the end, it doesn’t even matter. Boo! Greedy Kid launched a month before this review to a crispy $7 NZ dollaroonies. Everything, including the menu, the single looping song, the visual design, the gameplay, the story context, is kept incredibly simple. As someone with eyebrows and a beard, my priorities and expectations for games yearn for a touch more than what is offered here. But that doesn’t mean this is bad. It’s quick, clean, engaging fun. And if you want play as a kid who’s sole motivation to twerk at police officers is Dat Fizzy, this is a pretty effective jab.

It also reads as tailor-made for streamers. So, sure. Take that as you will.